Our citrus grove is now 7 years old and the trees are starting to produce more fruit than we can eat. We could manage it if it were spread out over 12 months, but it’s all coming on in a bit of a rush now. Even though we are in a drought, we did have a surprising down-pour of rain last week that gave us 27mm. Just at the right time to swell out these citrus crops nicely.

The mandarin and cumquat are not really fully ripe yet, but the Seville oranges are almost there, there are just a few ripe fruit on the North facing side of the tree. Everything else is booming. Lemons, lemonades, tangelos, limes, navels and grapefruits. All these are just ripe enough for making marmalade now.

Janine decided to offer a marmalade making workshop to help us use up this fruit productively. All we ask people to do is turn up with their glass jars, so that they can take home their produce, and something to contribute to a shared lunch. We offer to provide everything else. The fruit, sharp knives, cutting boards, sugar, big copper boilers and a couple of citrus juicers.

Janine spread the word through the local ‘greens’ and the ‘Seed Savers’  + the organic gardeners and the Picton art group. It just so happens that all these contact points are almost exactly the same people! Gentle, creative, thoughtful sensitive caring people have the same interests it seems.

Fortunately for us the Wollondilly Art Group had their monthly meeting postponed a week so that it clashed with our marmalade making workshop. I say fortunately, because we had 8 people and if we had had any more it would have been a bit tight in our little kitchen.

We started by walking down to the citrus grove and picking the fruit. Each person filling one of our wicker baskets with a different fruit.

We spend the morning peeling, slicing and dicing. Everyone brings along their own individual approach to dissecting the citrus fruit quite finely, some more finely than others. Janine and I have different approaches and we each demonstrate our own way. We also have two vastly different cooking methods and we prepare  batches by both methods.

I get the job of peeling the grapefruits, Seville oranges and eureka lemons, as they have a thick white pith. I have no trouble in being told to ‘pith-off’!

I’m told that the white pith isn’t needed in marmalade. So off it goes, the thin curly ‘peels’ can then be sliced very finely.  To very thinly slice the peel takes a lot longer. But I like it that way,  I don’t mind the time, I’ve set the day aside for this, it’s a pleasant activity and I know that I’ll enjoy the reward. Everything good takes time!

The remaining whole peeled fruit are cut in half and juiced, as we only use the juice, the peel and sugar. We don’t use water, nor do we soak the fruit over night. Just our very own ‘quick and dirty’ whole fruit method.

Once the fruit is on the stove, we settle down for a shared lunch and a chat while our handiwork simmers and fills the kitchen with that devine smell. One by one, as each boiler begins to ’gel’, we fill the glass jars as they come straight from the oven where they are sterilised for 10 minutes at 120oC and cap them off with simmered lids.

Everybody got to take home 2 or 3 jars of different marmalade blends. We made 4 different batches altogether.  I think that everyone enjoyed the day. I notice that no one was in a hurry to leave.

We are left with a dozen jars of different blends for our own pantry. It takes all day, but it’s a really pleasant day, well spent. Everything good takes time.

My car has just sent an email to my phone to up-date me on the progress of our driving. We have had our Hyundai Ionic ‘plug-in’ electric hybrid car for 5 months now. We have driven 5,000 kms so far and nearly all of that has been done on our own solar power. We have driven the 5,000 kms on just $70 worth of petrol. We have filled the petrol tank twice with $50 worth of fuel, but we still are only a third of the way through the 2nd tank full.

The first image that I have downloaded here shows that for the time period of one month, and the mileage that we covered over that time, the car should have generated 26grams of CO2 per kilometre. In actual fact we generated only 2 grams! It seems that the Hyundai software aggregates all the information from all the cars of the same make and model in Australia and rates the usage accordingly.

On this basis, we were rated 1st for the month February

This second image shows that our average litres per kilometre. was 845 km/L. Apparently the expected amount for this car should be closer to 20.

For this month our fuel consumption was 0.64 litres to travel 545 km. The expected fuel consumption should have been much higher, closer to 26 litres. So we are achieving 50 times better than the average.

I’m very pleased with this information, as this is just what I hoped to achieve when I bought this plug-in hybrid car. We have demonstrated that we can drive almost totally on sunshine. However, when we need to go on longer trips, there is no ‘range anxiety’, as we can use the small, fuel-efficient, petrol engine to go up to 1,100 km when both the battery and fuel tank are full.

It’s no accident that we can do this. We have spent all our lives working towards this situation. Making our own livelihood from our own small business, growing our own food, collecting our own water supply, dealing with our own sewage, making our own electricity and storing our excess solar power in our battery, all these choices leading up to this point, so that we can simply plug in our electric car and drive on sunshine.

Everything good takes time.